A world Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload

Part 2 will dive deeper into the principles for designing these
alternatives, but before we move on to the world beyond the hive
mind, we must first confront an equally important argument against
this approach to work: not only does it make us less productive; it
also makes us miserable—a reality that has massive consequences for
both individual well-being and organizational stability. It’s to this
claim that we now turn our (hopefully not too divided) attention.

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Chapter 2
Email Makes Us Miserable
An Epidemic of Silent Suffering
In early 2017, a new French labor law went into effect that attempted
to preserve a so-called “right to disconnect.” According to the law,
French companies with fifty employees or more are required to
negotiate specific policies about email after work hours, with the goal
of significantly reducing the time workers spend in their inbox in the
evening or over the weekend. Myriam El Khomri, the minister of
labor, justified the new law in part as a necessary step to reduce
burnout. Regardless of whether or not you believe such business
activities should be subject to government regulation, the fact that
the French felt the need to pass this law in the first place points to a
more universal problem that expands well beyond the borders of a
particular country: email is making us miserable.
1
We can make this claim more concrete by turning to the relevant
research literature. In a 2016 paper co-authored by Gloria Mark,
whom we met in the last chapter, a research team hooked up forty
knowledge workers to wireless heart rate monitors for twelve
workdays. They recorded the subjects’ heart rate variability, a
common technique for measuring mental stress. They also
monitored the workers’ computer use, allowing them to correlate
email checks with stress levels. What they found would not surprise
the French: “The longer one spends on email in [a given] hour the
higher is one’s stress for that hour.”
2
In a follow-up study conducted in 2019, a team once again led by
Mark placed thermal cameras below each subject’s computer
monitor, allowing them to measure the telltale heat that blooms
across the face indicating psychological distress. They discovered

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that batching your inbox checks—a commonly suggested “solution”
to improving your experience with email—is not necessarily a
panacea. In fact, for those who score high in the common personality
trait of neuroticism, batching emails actually makes you more
stressed (perhaps due to worry about all the urgent messages you’re
ignoring). The researchers also found that when stressed, people
answer emails faster, but not better—a text analysis program called
the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count reveals that these anxious
emails are more likely to contain words that express anger.
3
“While
email use certainly saves people time and effort in communicating,”
the authors of the 2016 study conclude, “it also comes at a cost.”
Their recommendation? “[We] suggest that organizations make a
concerted effort to cut down on email traffic.”
4
Other researchers have found similar connections between email
and unhappiness. A different 2019 study, appearing in The
International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health,
looked at long-term trends in the self-reported health of a group of
nearly five thousand Swedish workers. The researchers found that
repeated exposure to “high information and communication
technology demands” (translation: a need to be constantly
connected) was associated with “suboptimal” health outcomes. This
trend persisted even after they adjusted the statistics for many
potentially confounding factors, including age, sex, socioeconomic
status, health behavior, BMI, job strain, and social support.
5
Another way to measure the harm caused by email is to see what
happens when you reduce its presence. This is exactly what Harvard
Business School professor Leslie Perlow explored in an experiment
conducted with consultants from Boston Consulting Group. After
Perlow introduced a technique called predictable time off (PTO), in
which team members were provided set times each week when they
could completely disconnect from email and the phone (with the full
support of their colleagues), the consultants became markedly
happier. Before PTO was introduced, only 27 percent of the
consultants reported that they were excited to start work in the
morning. After the reduction in communication, this number
jumped to over 50 percent. Similarly, the percentage of consultants
satisfied with their job jumped from under 50 percent to over 70
percent. Contrary to expectations, this mild reduction in electronic
accessibility didn’t make the consultants feel less productive; it

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instead increased the percentage of those who felt like they were
“efficient and effective” by over twenty points.
6
As reported in her
2012 book on this research, Sleeping with Your Smartphone, these
results, when first encountered, left Perlow puzzled about why a
culture of constant connectivity was ever adopted in the first place.
7
Of course, we don’t really need data to capture something that so
many of us feel intuitively. As mentioned in the last chapter, I
conducted a survey of over 1,500 of my readers to find out more
about their relationship with tools like email. I was surprised by the
strong and emotionally charged words people used when asked to
describe their feelings toward this technology:
☐
“It’s slow and very frustrating. . . . I often feel like email is
impersonal and a waste of time.”
☐
“I hate that I can never be ‘off.’”
☐
“It creates anxiety.”
☐
“I’m frazzled—just keeping up.”
☐
“With email, I’m a lot more isolated in my workday . . . and I
don’t like that.”
☐
“You get haunted when everything is very busy.”
☐
“I feel an almost uncontrollable need to stop what I’m doing to
check email. . . . It makes me very depressed, anxious, and
frustrated.”
I suspect that people’s language would be much more neutral if
we asked them about other workplace technologies, like, say, their
word processor or the coffee maker. There’s something uniquely
deranging about digital messaging. The critic John Freeman
effectively summarizes our relationship with email when he notes
that with it, “we become task-oriented, tetchy, terrible at listening as
we try to keep up with the computer.”
8
Media theorist Douglas
Rushkoff is also onto something when he laments: “We compete to
process more emails . . . as if more to do on the computer meant
something good. . . . Instead of working inside the machine, as we

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did before, we must become the machine.”
9
We depend on email, but
we also kind of hate it.
This reality is important for practical reasons. When employees
are miserable they perform worse. They’re also more likely, as the
French labor minister warned, to burn out, leading to increased
healthcare costs and expensive employee turnover. Case in point:
Leslie Perlow found that predictable time off from email increased
the percentage of employees planning to stay at the firm “for the long
term” from 40 percent to 58 percent. Miserable employees, in other
words, are bad for the bottom line.
The reality that email makes us unhappy, however, also has an
implication that’s more philosophical than pragmatic. McKinsey
estimates that there are over 230 million knowledge workers
worldwide,
10
 which includes, according to the Federal Reserve, more
than a third of the US workforce.
11
If this massive population is being
made miserable by a forced devotion to inboxes and chat channels,
then this adds up to a whole lot of global misery! From a utilitarian
perspective, this level of suffering cannot be ignored—especially if
there’s something we might be able to do to alleviate it.
The previous chapter was about the impact of the hyperactive
hive mind on human productivity. This chapter is more about its
impact on the human soul. My goal in the pages ahead is to
understand why this workflow makes us so unhappy. As I’ll argue,
this reality is not some incidental side effect that can be cured with
clever inbox filters or better company norms; it’s instead
fundamental to the various ways in which this highly artificial
workflow conflicts with how our human brains naturally operate.